The early school at Ampleforth was built on the Catholic educational tradition established in continental exile. It was also, in its first three decades, an ambitious and innovative enterprise achieving a degree of success, from the perspectives of educational attainment and social prominence, that was not matched in its history until the twentieth century and its emergence as a major school within the English public school tradition. In its early years, however, Ampleforth was far removed from the Anglican schools that were to develop this tradition.

The school at Ampleforth was not originally intended to educate boys other than those intended for the religious life. The plan of the President of the English Benedictine Congregation, Fr. Bede Brewer, was that Ampleforth should be an exclusively monastic community, while Catholic lay boys were to be educated in Lancashire at the Benedictine school established earlier at Parbold. The Parbold school was derived from a small school for the sons of the gentry founded in 1789 by Fr. Gregory Cowley at Vernon Hall. The last Prior of Dieulouard, Fr. Richard Marsh, had taken control of this school in 1797 and then moved it, and the Community of St. Laurence, to Parbold in 1802. When subsequent plans to move the community again, this time to Yorkshire, were being made, Brewer had written, ‘I wish the school in Lancashire to continue as it is established though on a different plan. I would not admit to Ampleforth any boys other than such as the parents are willing, if they have a vocation, to take the Church.’ The beginnings of Ampleforth as a school for intending religious can be seen in a letter of 1803 from Brewer to Mrs. Metcalfe regarding the education of her sons, John and Edward, both of whom did join the community. The letter details the financial provisions for the arrangement. In total £450 was to be paid, ‘but in case the said sons or either of them should not choose or not be judged by the Master of Ampleforth Lodge School proper and fit to enter on any ecclesiastical state of life, or if the school should be discontinued or could not maintain itself at the present state of its pensions… this will be deducted at the rate of £25 per annum from the time entered into the school.’

It has become customary to regard John Lingard as the last, and perhaps finest, of the cisalpine historians, a case powerfully developed in the pages of Joseph Chinnici's The English Catholic Enlightenment, and elsewhere. One of the last generation of students to be trained at the English College, Douai, Lingard would here have been introduced to the Gallican writings of Claude Fleury and his contemporaries which gave shape to English cisalpinism. The first edition of his History of England (1819–1830) was written at least partially with the intention of paving the way for Catholic emancipation which the cisalpine Catholics had so long struggled to achieve. At the same time, this work succeeded in offering a far more forthright challenge to the Protestant reading of English history, fashioned so cogently in the early decades of the eighteenth century, than Lingard's cisalpine forebears would have been prepared to make: Lingard was moving on and is better understood as belonging to a period of transition for the Catholic community in England. Revisions in later editions bring Lingard's intentions even more to the fore. Never quite at ease with figures such as John Milner and Nicholas Wiseman, his onetime pupil and future Cardinal, and certainly not accepting their strident ultramontanism, Lingard is closer to them in his historical studies than sometimes he, or they, realised.

Nineteenth century London, like many towns and cities in Britain, experienced phenomenal population growth. At the centre of the British Empire, and driven by free trade and industry, it achieved extraordinary wealth, but this wealth was confined to the City and to the West End. East London, however, consisted of ‘an expanse of poverty and wretchedness as appalling as, and in many ways worse than the horrors of the industrial North’. There was clear evidence of the lack of urban planning, as factories were established close to the immense dock buildings constructed near Stratford. Toxic materials such as paint and varnish were produced in large chemical works owned by the German chemist, Rudolf Hersel, as were matches by the firm Bryant and May, and rubber, tar and iron for the building trade by various industrialists. Social historians have viewed the poverty of mid-nineteenth century London's East End as a symbol of urban disintegration in which skilled artisans were reduced to sweated, lowly-paid, labourers. Their homes, built close to the industrial sectors, were erected hastily and cheaply, and lacked proper hygienic and sanitary facilities, so that slum conditions prevailed. Moreover, this housing had to be demolished frequently to make way for new roads and railways, thus creating great hardship for an already destitute people.

‘Those who establish religious foundations are very closely linked with the life their benefaction has made possible. Their influence takes from day to day its part in the life of the foundation.’ So wrote the pseudonymous Robert Sencourt in 1948 as the start of an article about the Empress Eugénie. This present article will explore the elements in Eugénie's character and past life which motivated her to make such an unusual foundation as a mausoleum-abbey at Farnborough, her establishment of its church and house, the relationship between her and its clergy, and the lives of the religious communities (first Premonstratensian, then Benedictine) that staffed the abbey from its foundation until her grand funeral there, which provides the climax of the article.

The session before dinner was entitled ‘The Conference in Context’, meaning this one. What I want to say is also about ‘The Conference in Context’, meaning the first one, in 1958. When Timothy McCann and I were asked to mark the opening of the fiftieth Conference, we agreed that he would say something about people and I would say something about the questions which they discussed. But, rather than attempt in half an hour a survey of more than three hundred papers, not all of which I have heard or can remember, I want to focus on that first Conference, at Oxford in 1958, of which I am the only survivor here tonight. I was then still an undergraduate, and therefore short of cash. But I was already passionately interested in recusancy and reading manuscripts in Duke Humphrey when I ought to have been writing my next essay. So I did a deal with the Conference secretary, Anne See, that I could come for nothing if I would run the bar. That was obviously a vital contribution but on that occasion it was my only one: I was much too shy of the great experts around me to venture any opinions in discussion. All the same, I listened and learned, and there were three issues in that first conference which were to shape much of what was to come.